Re: WebPlatform Browser Support Info

On Oct 18, 2013, at 12:48, Ronald Mansveld <ronald@ronaldmansveld.nl> wrote:
> Tobie Langel schreef op 2013-10-18 11:27:
>> On Friday, October 18, 2013 at 9:56 AM, Niels Leenheer wrote:
>>> On Oct 18, 2013, at 12:23 AM, Tobie Langel <tobie@w3.org (mailto:tobie@w3.org)> wrote:
>>>> Finally, I'm not sure I understand the benefit of identifying browsers by UUID. (Aren't user agent strings good enough for that?) For a coarser (and more useful) picture, won't version strings do?
>>> Using the user agent string is not really useful. It is sometimes not specific enough, at other times far too specific and sometimes completely wrong.
>> I'm not advocating using UA strings to organize the results for
>> display, but to uniquely identify the browser on which the test was
>> run. This let's you then use a UA string parser of the desired
>> coarseness to display results. If we don't want to store UA strings,
>> we should agree on browser names rather than use UUID, in which case
>> I'd strongly advocate relying on the the names used by Browser Scope's
>> UA parser[1] which is fully open-sourced. Disclaimer, I co-lead the
>> project.
> 
> UA-string might be good enough, especially when combined with a good parser that distils the UA-string to the level we want to use it. I'm willing to use the UA-string combined with UA-parser, however, I need to check whether the MIT-license is compatible with the CC-BY that's used by webplatform. I'm still not too much into all the legal stuff to know this from the top of my head ;)

Using the UA-string as an identifier for data exchange is also not very useful I think.

The results I collect are not limited to a specific browser or UA string. For example one test result could say: this result is valid for Firefox 20 on desktop. There is not one UA-string for this result. There are maybe a couple of dozen. 

In case of Firefox I would want to exclude the OS and OS version.
In case of Firefox Mobile I would want to exclude the OS version, but not the OS itself.
In case of Internet Explorer 7 I would want to exclude the OS version, but not the OS itself.
In case of Internet Explorer 11 I would not exclude the OS at all.

Only the sites that actually run the tests and provide the results know the exact context in which the results are valid. You can not extract that information later on from just a UA-string.

What I think we need is a way to specify the context in which the test is valid and be able to generalise when possible and be specific when required.

Cheers,

Niels Leenheer
html5test.com

Received on Friday, 18 October 2013 11:47:33 UTC